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Predators’ crimes and punishment

Abused in a graveyard

While the country was celebrating Christmas on Dec 25, 2006, tree cutter K. Kamalason, 47, raped a five-year-old child in a Chinese graveyard in Kuantan. He inflicted his young victim with extremely serious internal injuries to her uterus, intestines and private parts.

Kamalason is married with two children ages two and six and was sentenced 20 years in jail and 20 strokes of the rotan.

Her stepfather, her rapist

As a stepfather, Zulkarnain Ramle, 40, of Kampung Sourabaya Hulu, Petra Jaya in Sarawak should have protected and cared for his stepchildren. Instead, Zulkarnain raped his 11-year-old stepdaughter three years ago when both her mother and elder sister were not at home.

The child told her mother, who lodged a police report and her daughter taken for a medical examination. Zulkarnain was sentenced to 12 years in jail on Nov 3, 2003.

On her way to work

On Oct 7, 2000, computer engineer Noor Suzaily Mukhtar, 24, boarded a Metro bus from Kuala Lumpur to her workplace in Klang. It was like any other day during her two-week attachment at a medical centre in Port Klang.

After the bus driver, Hanafi Mat Hassan, 38, dropped off the last remaining passenger at the Klang bus stand, he changed routes towards Banting and pulled over at the Bukit Tinggi project site. Noor Suzaily tried to escape but the doors were locked. The windows were heavily tinted so she could not draw attention. Hanafi raped her and used her headscarf to strangle her before tossing her naked body out of the bus. His wife had just given birth three days ago.

Noor Suzaily was dressed in a long skirt and tudung. Yet police said the murderer claimed he tak tahan (unable to control his lust).

Bomoh dupes teenage dropout

She was 14, has dropped out of school, and living with her parents in Berenang, Kajang. When she started suffering from unexplainable pains in her legs in July 2000, her father, a retired soldier, took her to see a trusted family friend who was a bomoh. He told her she would die if she wasn’t cured of her elephantiasis disease.

He convinced the girl’s father to set aside a room in their house to perform special prayers and treatments which could only be carried out after midnight to cure her. Over three years, the bomoh undressed the girl, raped and sodomised her while her parents slept. Before the “treatments”, the bomoh had forced the girl to spiritually marry him so they could have sex. She warned the girl not to inform her parents as the treatments must be kept a secret. In July 2003, the girl broke her silence and lodged a police report.

The bomoh is learnt to have seven wives and was previously acquitted of a charge of conducting a marriage ceremony contrary to Islamic law at the Lower Syariah court in Malacca.

Bomoh dupes high achiever student

She was 16 and scored 9As in her PMR. Then she started losing interest in her studies in 2002. Her worried father, a businessman, brought her to a famous bomoh, as he believed his daughter has been put under a spell.

The bomoh carried out his services in a hotel room. For several weeks, the businessman sent his daughter to the bomoh and waited in the lobby. By the time, he became suspicious, his daughter had been raped several times.

The suspect reportedly has treatment centres in Pahang, Johor and other states. Police started a hunt for the bomoh who has since been on the run.

Consensual sex or statutory rape?

Thor Guan Aik asked the right question to his teenage girlfriend before having sex with her two years ago in Sungai Nibong, Penang, “How old are you?” She told him she was 16, which was old enough, so they had sex. She was actually 14 and the case went to court as statutory rape.

On Oct 18, 2005, a Sessions Court freed Thor of the charge, ruling that the couple had consensual sex. The girl refused to testify in court. The judge also ruled her evidence as contradictory to the doctor and investigating officers’ testimonies. His release prompted women’s groups to call for an amendment of the Evidence Act to allow videotaped evidence to be allowed in cases.

Raped after birthday bash

In August 2004, lorry attendant Jailani Budin, 21, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to six charges of raping a Form Three girl after helping to celebrate her 15th birthday.

Jailani, who had two previous convictions for break-ins, took the girl on his motorcycle to three locations at different times. Although there was no element of violence, DPP Muhamad Iskandar Ahmad, pressed for the maximum sentence because he said rape offences were on the rise. Jailani’s wife was pregnant at the time he committed the offence.

The Nurul Huda Gani case

Jailani being led away by police after he was sentenced at the Sessions Court in Shah Alam.

With her home just 300m from the Tenaga Nasional Berhad sub-station in Kampung Pekajang, Tanjung Kupang in Galang Patah, Johor Baru, little Nurul Huda Gani had probably passed security guard Mohd Abbas Danus Baksan, 46, before, on her way to the nearby grocery shop.

On Jan 17, 2004, Mohd Abbas was convicted of dragging Nurul Huda into the station, raping and then murdering her.

When she didn’t return home, her worried brother and two sisters came looking for her. She was found in a squatting position inside a toilet at the station.

On Aug 28, 2004, Mohd Abbas was sentenced 20 years’ jail and 24 strokes of the rotan for raping the child, and sentenced to death for murdering her. He maintained his innocence that another security guard had been the killer.

The serial rapist

In January 2006, Beh Soon Hock (pic left), 39, lost his appeal against a sentence of 60 years and 24 strokes of the rotan for five offences of rape, sodomy, robbery and theft.

High Court Justice Abdull Hamid Embong, who rejected Beh’s appeal, said he agreed that the sentences imposed on him by a lower court were appropriate.

Beh had raped a South Korean woman and sodomised an Irish woman and a 10-year-old Kuwaiti boy. The unemployed bachelor had 53 previous convictions mostly for theft, housebreaking and mischief committed between 1985 and 1996.

The pensioner who raped

In August this year, Mat Saad Md Isa, 61, was convicted of raping an eight-year-old in a house in Sentul in 2001. The judge ordered to serve his 19-and-a-half years’ sentence for rape and four-and-a-half years’ sentence for an indecent act.

He used a condom

A roti canai seller raped his daughter and paid her RM5 as a “reward” to keep quiet. Court of Appeal judges unanimously rejected the 49-year-old father’s appeal to reduce his jail term in June 2008, after the defendant’s lawyer said, in mitigation, that he used a condom each time he raped the child.

The man was sentenced to 36 years and 20 strokes of the rotan by the Shah Alam Sessions Court on Aug 20, 2004 after he pleaded to four counts of raping his 11-year-old daughter at their house between May 2003 and Aug 9, 2004.